The northern lights dash above our heads in ribbons of green, turquoise, pink, purple, and fuschia. The pinholes in the firmament dazzle and twinkle, a fiery tail rockets across the sky, a shooting star, existing only for a moment.
The only sign of civilization high on this mountain’s flank are the satellites as they arc across the sky. Dancing among the constellations. Eight of us, bivouacked in our stone rookeries are at once like the satellites in the sky, wholly alien to that which surrounds us, yet absolutely home.
It is this play of Man and Nature, this cosmic masquerade that we as “I” have been struggling with since the birth of time, since the birth of “I”. What is our place? Our role? Our home? What is this “I” that knows me? It’s here, in these moments when climbing isn’t actually about climbing anymore. When we’ve moved past “escape” or “challenge” or “adventure” and into the realm of spirit and soul.
Climbing allows me to feel and to touch what is real, to live in the moment. To exist, to fear, to love, to thrive. So instead of drifting along lost in symbolism, simulation or artifice, I know viscerally in an embodied way that I am real, I am fragile yet strong, I am alone yet connected, I am different yet ultimately the same.
It shows me time and time again the earth, the stars, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the coming and goings of the sun. It calibrates my soul with the diurnal shifts of night and day rather than the endless ticking and tocking of our mechanized clocks. This transformative process of climbing has allowed me to align “how the world is” with “why the world does” and amongst steep cliffs and heather meadows, falling seracs and shouts of “on belay” and “off belay”, the mountains have shown me that we are all one Happening - a single beautifully complex process that started some 14 billion years ago.
Sometimes the climbing isn't about climbing at all.
What does climbing do for you?
Originally written for the Livsn Sunday Soapbox.
Pictures of our Bivy high on the flanks of Mt. Goode in the North Cascades National Park, on assignment for the American Alpine Institute.